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Welcome to Spycast.

My name is Dr. Andrew Hammond, historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations, spies, spy masters, intelligence officers and authors.

We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of everyday life.

Welcome to this week's episode of Spycast, spy satellites, space, surveillance.

This week we look at an organisation whose existence was only declassified in 1992.

The National Reconnaissance Office, or NROs, it's more popular known, are 60 years old this year.

I sat down with NRO historian Dr. James Outsen to discuss, well, they're history.

To me, the NRO are fascinating because they're the agency that designs, builds, launches and maintains America's intelligence satellites.

If you've ever wondered what is up there, now I mean way up there, this might just be the episode for you.

You're not as unfamiliar with satellites as you would think though, for starters, you're on one.

The Earth is a satellite of the Sun, the Moon is a satellite of the Earth, you get the general idea. Hope you enjoy.

Okay, so it's a pleasure to be joined this morning by Dr. James Outsen from the National Reconnaissance Office.

So I wonder just to begin, James, could you tell a listener's a little bit more about who you are and about how you ended up doing what you're doing?

Oh yes, absolutely. It's really a pleasure to be with you today and appreciate the chance that we'll have to talk a little bit about the National Reconnaissance Office and where we came from and where we're headed as an organisation.

I've worked at the National Reconnaissance Office for about a decade and a half now. I'm actually a CIA employee and the NRO or National Reconnaissance Office is staffed by officers from Central Intelligence Agency from Department of Defence and Uniform Services and a cadre of DOD employees.

So about 20 years ago, I took my first assignment at the NRO. It was a fascinating place to work and I've had the opportunity since to come back and serve as the historian for about a decade and now oversee a centre there that's responsible for historical studies, lessons learned, display of artifacts, sharing of artifacts like we have done with the Spy Museum and other outreach kinds of activities.

So that's what brought me to the organisation has been a real privilege in my life to have this opportunity.

For listeners, could you just get what the NRO has and what it's all about? Help our listeners get their heads around the NRO.

Yeah, be happy to do that. Actually, the NRO was established. It'll be 60 years ago on September 6th of this year. So we're celebrating our 60th anniversary.

And over those 60 years, we've had responsibility for end-to-end development of the National Reconnaissance Satellites, commonly referred to as Spy Satellites.

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